The management of clients' servers and desktop computers from a centralized management center requires the ability to overcome numerous technical barriers. The costs incurred by a developer/operator of centralized management systems in order to overcome these technical barriers reduces the developer's flexibility with respect to being able to bid on global solutions to the technical problems involved. For example, the problems and related issues involving networks, tools, staffing, deployment and redundancy all serve to reduce a developer's profits, lengthen the time it takes to deploy the solutions, and increase the difficulty of the global management techniques that can be used.
In an existing Service Management Centre (SMC) model, monitored client server customer equipment sends status information to a master database located in the SMC. This data can be used to generate reports, initiate trouble tickets, and provide historical data. The actual customer data is stored in databases located at the customer's site. These customer databases include security databases (e.g., containing data associated with individual and group access rights), Novell Directory Services (NDS) databases, domain or active directory databases, Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) databases, Domain Name System (DNS) and other types of databases, and the actual file systems used.
Three components are typically associated with an existing SMC model: (1) Presentation, or what is viewed at the various management stations in an SMC; (2) Application, or the tools used to manage hardware and software in a customer's environment and process database information; and (3) Data Management, or the management of databases that store customer information, Structured Query Language (SQL) information, user security information, and file systems information.
For the existing SMC model, the Presentation, Application, and some of the Data Management components are located in the SMC. The remaining Data Management components are located at the customer's site (e.g., including security databases, file systems, and other managed data). An existing SMC model having this configuration is typically referred to as a Distributed Data Management Model. Notably, the Applications or tools are centrally located at the supporting SMC, along with the Presentation component (and some of the Data Management component). The users, devices and files being managed are located within the customer's network. In other words, the largest portion of the Data Management component resides in the customer's network. A significant problem with such a configuration is that the SMC's ability to process information and control functions resides in the SMC, the data management functions reside mainly in the customer's network, and these components are separated by a network. As a result, the performance or responsiveness of the Distributed Data Management Model is limited by the network's bandwidth and other network performance characteristics.
The Distributed Data Management Model is also referred to as the Two-Tier Client Server Model. If the SMC is monitoring and managing the functions of multiple customers' networks, the Data Management component residing at the SMC incurs an increased share of the load. In other words, the portion of the load at the customer site remains the same for any given customer, but the load is increased at the SMC as new customers are added. As a result, the Two-Tiered Client Server Model requires more processing power by the Application component as each new customer is added. Also, the network bandwidth requirements are increased as new customers are added, which reduces the bandwidth available for the other customers (and thereby reduces the scalability of the SMC).